When Debate Seems Impossible

FEMINISM IS NOT dead yet. The March for Women's Lives proved at least that much. I, for one, was happy to see this return to arms in support of an original pillar of the feminist agenda. But the positive press this event received has obscured the more distasteful tinge of much contemporary feminist activism--the transformation of liberal feminism into feminist fascism.

The founding notion behind liberal feminism, that women should have the right to establish their own lifestyles and have an equal say in matrimonial affairs, won out long ago. Though this status quo has been attacked from the right, there is no sign that Americans are any less supportive of women's rights than they were ten years ago.

But feminism--or a certain brand of feminism--has gone beyond those liberal claims, attempting to recast the roles of men and women, and to change the rules of the Battle of the Sexes. Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will, laid the foundations by contending that women have been repressed by the socially tolerated threat of rape. One implication is that women can never achieve equality with men until rape is wiped out. Another is that sexual relations are somehow inherently unjust, that a man always has the tacit trump card of a potential rape to play against his partner.

The first implication explicitly underlies the feminist anti-pornography laws passed in Minneapolis and Indianapolis, which allow a woman to file a claim of discrimination against material that depicted women "as sexual objects for domination, conquest, violation, exploitation, possession or use, through postures or positions of submission or servility or display." The aim was to eliminate the objectification of women--the portrayal of the female sex as a tool for attaining sexual satisfaction. Viewing women this way, the logic goes, encouraged the act of rape.

The familiar "freedom of the press" counter-argument has opposed these laws. It has been less frequently noted, however, that the causal connection between pornography and rape is tenuous, at best. When the the Supreme Court affirmed that the Indianapolis version of these anti-porn laws was unconstitutional, it did so solely on First Amendment grounds.

As usual, the legal issues obscured the real ones. The feminist fascists used the rape argument as a Trojan Horse. Their ultimate purpose was to recast the relations of men and women.

BY USING THE term feminist fascists, I do not mean to imply that brown-shirted blondes are goose-stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue with swastikas and Hitler lockets. But there is a worrisome similarity between the aims and tactics of these extreme feminists and political fascists.

The feminist fascists, first of all, want gender purity. Women must shake off the ideologies and mores of masculine kultur. Secondly, they yearn for "A Place in the Sun," a separate but equal set of values for women. Women must be respected not just as equal persons, but simply and existentially for being women. Women must be represented and treated positively. Here, pornography is an obvious target. Ideally, men should look past a women's potential for a night of funzies, to the real qualities that make a woman a woman.

But something is missing. Why should I, as a man, change my attitudes? How can I? Vanessa Williams was a sex object before the Penthouse pictures were published, even before she entered the Miss America pageant, at least to the men who passed her on the street. Art is objectification; looking is objectification. We categorize and stereotype all the time. It's the way the mind works.

What happens when I objectify a women? I look at her, as Jimmy Carter once said, "with lust in my heart." But what is wrong with lust?, I wonder. It is a feeling as legitimate as any other, yet I am expected to downgrade and repress it, to deny that I can desire a woman just for her looks.

TALKING ABOUT DESIRE is not easy, because feminists have corned the market on talking about sexuality. In the March issue of Harpers, Philip Weiss writes about the difficulty of discussing the issue of pornography during the 1984 anti-porn campaign in Minneapolis:

Certain terms were used, and certain ideas. Other ideas had already been cashiered or were the subject of caricature. I felt that I was starting out at such a deficit. I had to keep my mouth shut. To say, I am a man who feels aroused by looking at and reading some of this stuff was no argument. It was like saying, I am a lizard.

Most men don't object to equality in relationship, in the workplace, or in the home. I think we do have some problems, however, with being told how and what we can think about women. Perhaps the traditional masculine ideals of sex are pernicious. Why should the neo-puritan conceptions of the feminist fascists be any better?

A compromise is in order. But how can we discuss an issue when one side refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the other? The feminist fascists rely--just as Nazis did--on ad hominem attacks. If you opposed the Nazis, they shouted "You're not a German, or you would agree with us," or otherwise labeled you as a communist. Similarly, I'm told, "You're not a woman, so you can't understand what it's like." Or worse, I'm labeled as "insensitive," hence not worthy of being listened to.

EVEN WHEN MY opinion is not absolutely rejected, I cannot place my desires on the same moral plane as women can. As Weiss notes, "The qualities the women had brought to the [negotiating] table--sincerity, an emotional intensity about sexual issues--were somehow not available to men." Making an appealing case for male desire is hard when sex is dirty.

Somehow, feminism has managed to dominate the moral high ground and low ground at the same time. I feel like a liberal caught in Hitler's Germany. If I speak out, I run the risk of being shouted down. When I do speak out, my arguments--freedom of thought and expression, the legitimacy of "male" desire--sound dull and lifeless next to the appeals against phallocracy and pornocracy.

The left is my enemy, and the right agrees with the measures, though not the aims, of the left. I am stuck in the middle of the road, and as a Texas politician once commented, "The only thing you find in the middle of the road is dead armadilloes."